By:
Christina Restrepo Nazar, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Science Education, California State University Los Angeles
Angela Calabrese Barton, Ph.D., Professor, Educational Studies Department, University of Michigan

What justice-centered challenges do youth from minoritized communities face in learning science?
Research shows that meaningfully supporting youths’ community and out-of-school experiences in STEM can provide significant opportunities for school science learning (Birmingham et al., 2017). Despite such evidence, there are limited opportunities for pre- and in-service teachers to learn how to connect STEM learning with students’ cultural repertoires to support engaging in meaningful work in classrooms.
To begin to connect the dots, we engaged in a three-paper dissertation study—with separate but interrelated research questions, methods, and analysis— the results of which are contextualized in this blog.
Theoretical Framework and Knowledge Base
To understand how beginning teachers make sense of youths’ rich cultural practices and actions across space and over time, we draw upon social practice theory (SPT) (Holland & Lave, 2009). SPT provides insight into the tensions and competing narratives that influence actions in local practice. Holland and Lave (2009) refer to “two forms of history,” the personal and the institutional, as important in shaping people’s practices and interactions. These forms of history, “history in person” and “history in institutionalized struggles,” are always present and in relation to the activities in which individuals participate. The intersection of these histories impacts both teachers and youths’ conceptions of what it means to engage in community-centered and meaningful STEM learning.
To further center the intersection of youth histories, we look towards Ladson Billings’ (2006) notion of the education debt as a backdrop for why it is important for science teacher educators to learn from youths’ lives. The education debt reminds us that inequities in science education are rooted in systemic practices and policies that favor whiteness. In science classrooms, forms of systemic racism that students encounter are many, and include policies and practices that structure what students learn and how and on what they are evaluated, among others. The education debt reminds us that efforts to disrupt systemic racism need to focus on remediating elements of the system. This is an important shift.
Equity-centered research in science education has tended to focus on remediating the individual student. For example, powerful studies of students’ cultural practices in science education exist. However, the focus of such work has been on how to bridge such knowledge and practice with that of science, such that students can more fully engage in the discipline as it is. In other words, the focus has been on how to help students “crossover” from their own cultural worlds to the worlds of science, as if these worlds are discontinuous, and with the onus of responsibility for transformation on the students. We suggest something different.
Methods
Data for these three related studies were collected between 2013-2018. For the first and third study, we employed critical ethnographic multiple case studies which focus on work “with” participants, rather than “on” or “for” them (Calabrese Barton, 2001). The methodology provides an analytic lens in which to “politicize” the interaction between actors and the social structures through which they act.
In the first youth-participatory study, the analytic lens captured the lives and experiences of three youth of Color - AD, Faith (Nazar, Calabrese Barton & Rollins, 2018) and Christopher (Nazar, Calabrese Barton, Morris & Tan, 2019), who participated in the Great Lakes City Community Center after-school science and engineering program from December 2013 to May 2018. In this co-participatory work, the youth co-developed multimodal case studies of meaningful science and engineering learning. Using videos, audio and other online resources, they discuss family, home and school knowledge, practices, and experiences that relate to their science identities and agency while creating inventions to solve important issues in their communities. The second study presents the conceptual development and analysis of teacher education students participating in a Fall 2017 university science methods course co-taught by the authors of this blog. In addition, Faith, AD, and Christopher provided input in the course development and use of multimodal artifacts from their design year. Additionally, they visited the course to discuss their science and engineering learning across K-9, offering important insights on how the education debt has parlayed throughout their elementary, middle, and high school science education (Nazar & Calabrese Barton, in press). The social design experiment methodology (Gutiérrez, 2008), allowed the youth to bring their science education experiences into the course by challenging normative structures of power inherent in preservice teachers (PSTs) learning about the curriculum, teaching, and learning of STEM. The third study followed three teachers, Sophia, Maria, and Carol, from the science methods course into their field teaching semester, including an ethnographic analysis of their student teaching focused on science and engineering at a Spanish Immersion School in Midwest, United States. With this work, our goal was to understand how learning from youth lives in methods courses could provide important opportunities to enact the youth-centered practices they envision during their learning to teach and particularly how contextual factors affected enactment during PSTs’ field experiences. Working with the three PSTs over 15 weeks during their science methods course helped to reveal historical and cultural practices guiding participation, identity formation, and action taking in their views of teaching during the PSTs’ student teaching semester. Findings Overall, findings showed that it is important that PSTs, in their learning to teach, understand what youth value about the work they do in school and in their communities. The first study showed that artifacts co-created with youth, including multimodal resources developed about their engineering design projects, challenged ways that PSTs saw youth as scientists and engineers while also sending explicit messages to PSTs about what it means to teach science meaningfully to youth in their communities (Nazar et al., 2018; Nazar et al., 2019). One of the major findings in the second study that transitioned into the third showed that PSTs were able to critically re-examine the purposes and goals of science by layering and examining knowledge and practice from their own K-16 STEM experiences alongside the methods, community contexts, and youth multimodal artifacts. Because of this learning, PSTs challenged structures of power and privilege within their field classrooms. As the PSTs completed their field teaching semester during the methods course, they found ways to critically re-think and re-imagine their observations in support of upholding their field students’ views of science, increasingly seeking to connect these views with the youth cases. In one example, Sophia, a PST who participated in the course and was a focal case in study three, learned to challenge normative discursive practices in her field teaching classroom from experiences learned from Faith’s case. When Faith visited our course, she taught PSTs about her FANcy Hat and how the NASA Engineering Design Process used in most science classes did not represent her FANcy Hat’s engineering design process. This particular day, Faith worked closely with Sophia’s group. Faith explained: By Faith showing the PSTs the big X drawn on the NASA engineering cycle, and teaching them about her own engineering design work—creating her own cycle, describing the process she took to create with community, and teaching the PSTs about it—Sophia and the other PSTs understood what it meant to engage in a type of engineering design process that was culturally relevant. It was an engineering process that upheld Faith’s knowing and being, including histories of her family and community when creating her FANcy Hat. She could not find meaningful ways to connect to the NASA engineering cycle; rather, her work showed that youth can (and do) create and sustain their own cultural repertoires of practice in K-12 schooling, despite not being legitimized for it, especially in science education. Sophia, by learning from Faith’s work, recognized that this legitimacy was a missing link in her work as a science teacher. In her student teaching, she forged new opportunities to open space for students to create in her mentor teacher’s classroom. Sophia did this by challenging where learning takes place, such as moving design work from tables to the carpet; while challenging norms by opening up space for youth to create all around the classroom. Challenging behavioral approaches instituted in her mentor teacher’s classroom, Sophia no longer used engineering design time as a “reward,” perceived by students as a fun time but made it an important time for learning. She also stopped assigning roles (e.g. recorder, designer, etc.) based on teacher perceived abilities, and provided a variety of available materials—which were at one point itemized and distributed only to students who showed “promise” in their engineering design work. Sophia challenged and re-imagined a new classroom culture, desisting compliance-driven learning. Sophia allowed youth to claim space and to direct their own engineering projects, asking for teacher support if necessary. In doing this, students were encouraged to use their native languages, including Arabic and Spanish, to design their sketch-ups and models and request feedback from peers and community members when engineering their designs. Sophia discussed her work in the classroom: In study three, all the PSTs took different approaches to implementing justice-oriented science teaching practices based on differing contextual practice even if these orientations went in contradiction to the practices of their mentor teachers. In addition, in all three cases, opportunities for tension and allowing PSTs to grapple with them are what forged opportunities to imagine, enact or shape/reshape ways to support meaningful science learning for and with youth in their classrooms, significantly shifting their teaching practice in more justice-oriented ways. Conclusions, Implications, and Significance This work focuses on the importance of designing methods course alongside field experiences in support of critically engaging PSTs with cultural, historical, and social community underpinnings of youth in equitably consequential ways—by first and foremost centering youth in STEM learning. This work has serious implications, especially now for impacts on home/community/knowledge and practice through experiences with COVID-19, technological access to meaningful science learning experiences, and critical development of scientific literacy. It is imperative that teachers are educated to begin where youth are, especially in unpacking these pressing critical understandings and connections between science and community. These power dynamics can and should be disturbed. By providing frameworks like those which will continue to be developed from research presented in this blog, they give way to recognizing how race, class, gender, ability, and other hegemonic structures have contributed to historical gaps in STEM learning. Most importantly, we should recognize how youth are already teaching us how to challenge these hegemonic structures in practice. Note: The research discussed in this blog is informed by Dr. Restrepo Nazar’s dissertation study, Youth as Teacher Educators: Supporting Preservice Teachers in the Developing Youth Centered, Equity-Oriented Science Teaching Practices, for which she received AACTE’s 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Award.